Young adults are on the true threshold of life. They have outgrown their childhood, survived the rigors of adolescence, and now catch a glimpse of their great potential as they move into early maturity. For them to see even a short way into the future (and everyone can) is almost breathtaking. Young adults are assuming increased reasonability and now influence the shape of things to come to a remarkable degree. What kind of World will they build? Just as children or primitives believe they can change the Universe at large by performing magical rituals, they seek to transform society by transforming themselves. Being human, they will make mistakes like the generations before them, for who can be perfect in this life? It is true that we today enjoy a technology never before known, and that many of us may seem better educated than forefathers. However, are we any wiser? It not wisdom the basis of real progress. Whence comes wisdom? The youth today flaunt their separateness from the mainstream society by styling their hair like the beetles, letting it grow long like a mermaid, or shaving it all off and donning buckskin and diamonds, pearls, gold, platinum, and silver. They exorcised the Christian demon—pleasures of the flesh—by advocating and practicing “free love” and communal living, which is almost necessary in this economy. They shoor off the fetters of Western religion by dabbling in arcane schools of thought and Eastern religions. They revolted against the Western emphasis on rationality by rejecting objective consciousness as the only method of gaining access to reality. In one fell swoop, three hundred and fifty years of science were thrown out the door to nowhere, and magic, paganism, and witchcraft were revived as viable Worldly outlooks. However, has today’s brilliance produced a greater talent than Shakespeare? Can we find a modern man with greater wisdom than Solomon? Whose writings today can compare with those of Martin Buber? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Technology cannot produce a Merchant of Venice nor can any modern school of thought write a book like the Bible. So the past had its greatness too, and we still feed upon it. Western society, has over the past three centuries, incorporated a number of marginalized groups whose antagonism toward the scientific World view has been irreconcilable, and who have held out against the easy assimilation to which the major religious congregations have yielded in their growing desire to seem progressive. Theosophists and fundamentalists, spiritualists and flatearthers, occultists and satanists…it is nothing new that there should exist anti-rationalist elements in our midst. What is new is that a radical rejection of science and technological values should appear so close to the center of society, rather than on the negligible margins. Greatness of some kind ha characterized every age. It has always sprung from a common source, and that source is God. Sockrates acknowledged Him. Shakespeare’s most sublime expression reflect the teachings of scripture. Columbus prayed. Washington, Lincoln, Trump, and Churchill sought guidance in the Bible. Darwin was devout, and Von Braun, today’s space genius, worships the diving. Then can young adults do less? If their World is to be secure, it must rest upon they only sure foundation men have ever known—reliance upon Almighty. Throughout the ages efforts have been made to live without God. Both nations and individuals have tried it and with similar results. “And I did endeavor to preach unto this people, but my mouth was shut, and I was forbidden that I should preach unto them; for behold they had willfully rebelled against their God; and the beloved disciples were taken away out of the land, because of their iniquity,” reports Mormon 1.16. Inevitably, rejection of God means rejection of his way of life. His rules always lead upward with one objective: to help us become like Him. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Six times, in the story of creation, God sees “that it is good,” but the seventh time, after the creation of man, He looks at everything He has made and sees “that it is very good.” How did the first humans’ very good become the only-evil of the human race? However, it is not man who is seen as evil. Adam was a good man, and his intellect was better than its reputation. He built prognostications, not prophecies. He pretended to nothing more. Built them out of history and statistics, using facts of the past to forecast the probabilities of the future. It was merely applied science. An astronomer foretells an eclipse, yet is not obnoxious to the charge of pretending to be a prophet. Noah was a prophet; and certainly no one has more reverence for him and for his sacred office than many of us today. The “wickedness” does not imply a corruption of the soul, the living soul which was breathed into man, but of the “way,” which fills the Earth with “violence”—and this results from the intervention, not of the evil soul, but of the evil “imagery.” The wickedness of the actions is derived from its, the imagery’s, wickedness. Imagery or “imaging” corresponds, in a conceptual World which is simpler but more powerful than ours, to our “imagination”—not the power of imagination, but its products. Man’s heart emanates designs in images of the possible, which would be made into the real. Imagery, the depictions of the heart, is play with possibility, play as self-temptation, from which ever and again violence springs. It too, like the deed of the first humans, does not proceed from a decision; but the place of the real, perceived fruit has been taken by a possible, devised, fabricated one which, however, can be made, could be made—is made into a real one. This imagery of the possible, and in this its nature, is called evil. Good is not devised; the former is evil because it distracts from divine reality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Turning from God, we find ourselves drifting in a new direction, leading away from the up and, inevitably, toward the down? Can anyone afford it? Hosts have tried it and all have paid its price. It is costly—the painful—way to live, even though it may seem glamorous and attractive at first. Sin has a price for what sin gives us, and it is greater than any of us can afford. In the wake of sin comes every form of heartbreak, and its victims have suffered. So have others. For instance, Starbucks is closing six of its locations due to safety concerns. The change against the situation of the first humans stems from the knowledge of good and evil, not from disobedience as such, but from its immediate consequences. Man has therein become like a God, in that now, like God, man “knows” oppositeness; be he cannot, like God, rise superior to it. Thus, from divine reality, which was allotted to him, for the “good” actuality of creation, he is driven out into the boundless possible, which he fills with his imaging, that is evil because it is fictitious: even in exile, man’s expulsion from divine reality is continually repeated by his own agency. In the swirling space of images, through which he strays, each and every thing entices him to be made incarnate by him; he grasps at them like a wanton burglar, not with decision, but only in order to overcome the tension of omnipossibility; it all becomes reality, though no longer divine but his, his capriciously constructed, indestinate reality, his violence, which overcomes him, his handiwork and fate. That man, at the mercy of the knowledge of good and evil, without being able to transcend its opposites—there is no other transcendence than that of the Creator—brings the compelled chaotic of the possible, which is continuously, capriciously incarnating itself, over the created World, that is what causes God to repent of having made man; He wants to wipe him out from the face of the Earth and with him every living thing drawn by the author of violence into his corruption—it repents Him that He made them all. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Each territory that has a more successful neighbour simply converts to the rule of the most successful of its neighbours. After twenty-four generations, the process of badness can stop evolving, only when all of the rules that are not nice have been eliminated. With only nice rules left, everyone is always cooperating with everyone else and no further conversation can take place. There are a number of striking features in this stable pattern of strategies. In the first place, the surviving strategies are generally clumped together into regions of varying size. The random scattering that began the population has largely given way to regions of identical rules which sometimes spread over a substantial distance. Yet there are also a few very small regions and even single territories surrounded by two or three different regions. The rules which survived tend to be rules which do well. Never defect first. However, what is unique about it is that when the other party defects first, the party who did not defect can get the other individual(s) to “apologize” so profusely that the party that honored the contract or agreement ends up doing better than if there had been mutual cooperation. The great democratic danger is enslavement to public opinion. The claim of democracy is that every man decides for himself. The use of one’s natural faculties to determine for oneself what is true and false and good and bad is the American philosophic method. Democracy liberates from tradition, which in other kinds of regimes determine the judgment. Prejudices of religion, class and family are leveled, not only in principle but also in fact, because none of their representatives had an intellectual authority. Equal political right makes it impossible for church or aristocracy to establish the bastions from which they can affect men’s opinions. Churchmen, for whom divine revelation is the standard, aristocrats in whom the reverences for antiquity are powerful, fathers who always tend to prefer the rights of the ancestral to those of reason, are all displaced in favor of the equal individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Even if men seek authority, they cannot find it where they used to find it in other regimes. Thus the external impediments to the free exercise of reason have been removed in democracy. Men are actually on their own in comparison to what they were in other regimes and with respect to the usual sources of opinion. This promotes a measure of reason. However, since very few people school themselves in the use of reason beyond the calculation of self-interest encouraged by the regime, they need help on a vast number of issues—in fact, all issues, inasmuch as everything is opened to fresh and independent judgment—for the consideration of which they have neither time nor capacity. Even the self-interest about which they calculated—the ends—may become doubtful. Some kind of authority is often necessary for most men and is necessary, at least sometimes, for all men. In the absence of anything else to which to turn, the common beliefs of most men are almost always what will determine judgement. This is just where tradition used to be most valuable. Without being seduced by its undemocratic and antirational mystique, tradition does provide a counterpoise to and a repair from the merely current, and contains the petrified remains of old wisdom (along with much that is not wisdom). The active presence of a tradition in a man’s soul gives him a resource against the ephemeral, the kind of resource that only the wise can find simply within themselves. The paradoxical result of the liberation of reason is greater reliance on public opinion for guidance, a weakening of independence. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Although, reason is exposed at the center of the stage. Although every man in democracy thinks himself individually the equal of every other man, this makes it difficult to resist the collectivity of equal men. If all opinions are equal, then the majority of opinions, on the psychological analogy of politics, should hold sway. It is very well to say that each should follow his own opinion, but since consensus is required for social and political life, accommodation is necessary. So, unless there is some strong ground for opposition to majority opinion, it inevitably prevails. This is the really dangerous form of the tyranny of the majority, not the kind that actively persecutes marginalized groups, but the kind that breaks the inner will to resist because there is no qualified source of nonconforming principles and no sense of superior right. The majority is all there is. What the majority decides is the only tribunal. It is not so much its power that intimidates but its semblance of justice. Americans talk very much about individual right but there is a real monotony of thought and vigorous independence of mind is rare. Even those who appear to be free-thinkers really loo to a constituency and expect one day to be part of a majority. They are creatures of public opinion as much as are conformists—actors of nonconformism in the theater of the conformists who admire and applaud nonconformity of certain kinds, the kinds that radicalize the already dominant opinions. Revolutionary wealth brings a new future for impoverishment. While no future arrives with a guarantee, the arrival of the Third Wave knowledge-based economy brings with it the best chance yet of—once and for all—breaking the back of global poverty. It would be utopian to suggest that we could totally eliminate material want everywhere on the planet. Poverty has too many sources—from stupid economic policies and bad political institutions climate shifts, epidemics and war. However, it is not utopian to recognize that we now have—or are on the edge of developing—extremely powerful new anti-poverty tools. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Poverty is supposedly everyone’s enemy. Virtually every government in the World claims to be trying to eliminate it. Thousands of NGOs collect money to feed hungry children, purify village water supplies and bring medical care to the countryside. Pious resolutions issue forth from the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund the Food and Agriculture Organization and other international agencies charged, at least in part, with fighting poverty. And the adjectives applied to global penury run from merely “heartbreaking” to “disgraceful,” “tragic,” “shameful,” “scandalous,” “appalling,” “shocking,” “unspeakable” and “inexcusable.” Thousands of meetings and conferences have been devoted to the problem. Hordes of well-intentioned experts have flown into remote regions to provide technical assistance, and an enormous multibillion-dollar “aid industry” has grown up around global poverty reduction. Between 1950 and 2000, more than $1 trillion flowed from the rich World to the poor in the form of “aid” or “development assistance.” Some of these dollars saved lives and did improve conditions: The smallpox eradication program in the 1960s, child immunization in the 1980s and campaigns against river blindness, trachoma, leprosy and polio. Yet, globally, 10 percent of the World is living on less than $2 a day. That is just over 700 million people living on less than $1.90 a day. For every 1,000 children born, 39 will die before they turn five. Globally, there are over 65 million children not attending school. And 1.1 billion survive in extreme or absolute poverty on less than one dollar. What is truly amazing about this, however—apart from the failure to wipe out global poverty after half a century of concerted international effort—is the incredible success these numbers reveal—once we look at them in reverse. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Noe of this is intended to minimize the tragedy of twenty-first century poverty. However, a time traveler from the seventeenth century who turned up in the World today would be stunned not by how poor the human race is but by how big and unbelievably rich it has become. Having left behind a World that barely supported a population of 500 million people ridden by successive famines and plagues, he or she would surely marvel that more than 7.25 billion humans survive on the planet today, including more than 6.67 billion people live above the two-dollar poverty lines. The benefits of communication—whether Morse’s telegraph, Bell’s telephone, or today’s high-speed data networks—are relative. If no one has them, all competing firms operate, as it were, at the same neural transmission rate. However, when some do and other do not, the competitive arena is sharply tilted. So companies rushed to adopt Bell’s new invention. Telephones changed almost everything about business. They permitted operations over a greater geographical area. Top executives could now speak directly with branch managers or salesmen in distant regional offices to find out, in detail, what is going on. Voice communication conveyed far more information, through intonation, inflection, and accent, than the emotionless dah-dits of Morse code ever could. The phones made big companies bigger. They made centralized bureaucracies more efficient. Switchboards and operators proliferated. Secretaries overheard calls and learned when to keep mum. They learned to screen calls, thereby partially controlling access to power. At first the phone also abetted secrecy. A lot of business could now be transacted without the incriminating evidence of a piece of paper. (Later came technologies for wiretapping and bugging, tipping the scales in the never-ending battle between those who have business secret and those who want to penetrate them.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

The indirect benefits of this advanced communications system were even greater. Phones helped integrate the industrializing economy. Capital markets became more fluid; commerce, easier. Deals could be made swiftly, with a confirming letter as follow-up. Phones accelerated the pace of business activity—which, in turn, stepped up the rate of economic development in the more technically advanced nations. In this way, one might argue that telephones, over the long term, even affected the international balance of power. (This claim is less outrageous than it might seem at first glance. National power flows from multiple sources, but one can crudely track the rise of America to a position of global dominance by looking at its communications system relative to other nations. As late as 1956, half of all the telephones in the World were in the United States of America. Today, as America’s relative dominance declines, that percentage has slipped to about one third.) Occupying the gray area between biology and technology is cybernetic theory. The word’s root is Greek for “steersman” and Andre Ampere used the word in 1834 to mean “science of control” or “the branch of politics which is concerned with the means of government.” Norbert Wiener used the term to refer to “the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine” concerned especially with mathematical analysis of information flow between biological, electronic and mechanical systems, and maintenance of order in those systems. The complexity of predicting trajectories of quickly moving targets during World War II sparked Wiener and Julian Bigelow’s development of cybernetics. Constantly changing information about the target’s direction and speed necessitated feedback devices which would allow a gun to regulate its own movements. Interestingly enough, human operators in Wiener’s automatic gun (which was never built) were given equal status with electro-mechanical components in the feedback loop. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Information gleaned from the project concerning feedback and servo-mechanisms led Wiener and associates to devise a model of the central nervous system that “explained some of its most characteristic activities as circular processes, emerging from the nervous system into the muscles, and re-entering the nervous system through the organs. The connecting link was electronics, and the almost mystical fit between mathematic logic and the behaviour of electronic circuits. The thrust of the new information sciences was to precisely define and measure information in mathematic terms; to add information to the list of fundamental definitions basic to science—matter, energy, electric charge and the like. “It has long been clear to me,” says Wiener in Cybernetics, “that the modern ultra-rapid computing machine was in principle an ideal central nervous system t an apparatus for automatic control; and that its input and output need not be in the form of numbers or diagrams but might very well be, respectively, the readings of artificial sense organs, such as photoelectric cells or thermometers, and the performances of motors or solenoids.” Information transfer is fundamental to discussing the current state of technology. Automata need only instructions to accomplish given tasks. The link with the machine is mental. Machine language carries out work. Language, according to Wiener, “is not exclusively an attribute of living beings but one which they may share to a certain degree with the machines man has constructed.” Cybernetics recorded the switch from one dominant model, or set of explanations for phenomena, to another. Energy—the notion central to Newtonian mechanics—was now replaced by information. The ideas of information theory, such as coding, storage, noise, and so on, provided a better explanation for a whole host of events, from the behaviour of electronic circuits to the behaviour of a replicating cell. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Electrical powering of machinery allowed a dialogue between organic and mechanized systems. Galvani’s discovery of electrical nervous stimulation in animal muscles around 1790 was the starting point of electrophysiology (apparently an inspiration to Mary Shelley). In 1875, electronic brain currents were discovered and in 1924, Hans Berger devised a method of recording electrical activity from the surface of the scalp, later to become known as electro-encephalography, central to biofeedback. All living tissues is sensitive to electric current and generates small voltages. Our nervous system’s activity is accompanied by electrical potentials and can be controlled externally by electricity, providing a means of direct communication between human and machine systems, the common thread of biofeedback. Technical history, then, involves extension and replacement of human functions in more than just a metaphorical sense. Wiener, again, was the first to suggest using myoelectric currents (produced by contracting muscle fiber) to control the motions of prosthetic limbs. He believed that signals from the brain to the muscle fiber in the stump of the limp could be tapped by electrodes. Small motors in the prosthesis could amplify the current to control the limb’s movements. The “Boston Elbow” and “Utah Arm” are motor-driven prostheses that follow this procedure almost exactly, using electrodes that attach to the shoulder muscle or lay implanted in the arm socket. Through biofeedback the amputee learns to control the device somewhat like a normal limb. Nobel Prizes are more often awarded for discoveries than for the tools (including instruments and techniques) that made them possible. If the goal is to spur scientific progress, this is a shame. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

This pattern of reward extends throughout science, leading to a chronic underinvestment in developing new tools. Philip Abelson, an editor of the journal Science, points out that the United States of America suffers from “a lack of support for development of new instrumentation. At one time, we had a virtual monopoly in pioneering advances in instrumentation. Now practically no federal funds are available to universities for the purpose.” It is easier and less risky to squeeze one more piece of data out of an existing tool than to pioneer the development of a new one, and it takes less imagination. However, new tools emerge anyway, often from sources in other fields. The study of protein crystals, for example, can benefit from new X-ray sources developed by physicists, and techniques from chemistry can help make new proteins. Because they cannot anticipate tools resulting from innovations in other fields, scientists and engineers are often too pessimistic about what can be achieved in their own fields. Nanotechnology will join several fields, and yield tools useful in many others. We should expect surprising results. Today’s tools for making small-scale structure are of two kinds: molecular-processing tools and bulk-processing tools. For decades, chemists and molecular biologists have been using better and better molecular-processing tools to make and manipulate precise, molecular structures. These tools are of obvious use. Physicists, as we will see, have recently developed tools that can also manipulate molecules. Combined with techniques from chemistry and molecular biology, these physicist’s tools promise great advances. Microtechnologists have applied chip-making techniques to the manufacture of microscopic machines. These technologies—the main approach to miniaturization in recent decades—can play at most a supporting role in the development of nanotechnology. Despite appearance, it seems that microtechnology cannot be refined into nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

In 1973, a wealthy young man leased a small suburban television station near San Francisco and tried the most curious experiment. He presented only two programs every day. One occupied most of the day with images of ocean waves rolling to shote. One camera, no editing, no zooms. It just sat there and transmitted whatever the ocean did. Then he switched to another single camera in an empty studio facing a blank wall. He invited everyone to do whatever he or she wished in front of the camera. Some people spoke into it; others tried more sensational behaviour. The first thing that was revealed by this experiment, which was practically an inversion of the usual television fare, was the extent to which the medium depends upon its technical events. A single stationary camera, picking up whatever passes through the frame, in real time, without alteration, will only bore people. If a professional producer-editor had gotten hold of that ocean footage, she or he could have created more interest in it. She or he could have zeroed in on details, shot from a helicopter following the waves forward, switched to a camera on the beach looking outward, and so on. With a little music, a nice little piece might have been made out of it. However, it would be engaging only for a short while. No matter what technical tricks are used, ocean footage will not work very long on television. It does not fit the test of highlighted moments. The experience of looking at oceans is beyond television’s ability to deliver. To enjoy an ocean, one must be in a timeless condition, contemplative yet alert to the small changes in the sea and the life it supports. If you are looking for action and catharsis watching an ocean will only bore you. Watching it on TV is worse. You lose that salt smell, the wind, the lazy detail of the foam and light on wet sand and the sense of vast time and space. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Television would also lose the nuances of a commonplace visit to a coffeehouse. The mundane conversation and people moving around or reading the paper would be profoundly boring to viewers sitting at home in their living rooms, unless, of course, some clown appeared and started tripping over everyone’s feet while dropping trays, and then someone began to throw pastries around or spilled cappuccino on people’s heads, or a bakery truck loaded with lemon meringue pies came crashing through the glass window. Now we are getting somewhere. Action. In practice, no TV producer would ever seriously consider either oceans or coffeehouses as subject matter. They are intrinsically and obviously wrong subjects for the medium, “bad” television. On the other hand, there are a lot of talking shows on television. Some people think this is odd since television is supposed to be a visual medium. Well, since television is so indistinct a medium, and since so little visual information can get through it, most of what we receive from television really comes in the words. This is especially true of news shows. We see some action—fires, wars, picketing—but we cannot really make much of it until a reporter tells us what is happening and orients our minds to perceive what we are actually not seeing at all. In many ways television is really radio. The only real effect of the imagery is to fixate us. Another reason why there is so much talking on television is that you can see faces. Faces talk. So naturally there is a bias toward talking. Within the talking there is a bias toward a kind of highlighted conversation. Television talking is very pointed. Subject oriented, rather than a generalized. Focused, rather than free-ranging. This is particularly the result of time limitations and the need to be sure that something happens beyond the kind of talk that takes place in grocery stores. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

On television people tend to skim along the highlights of the conversational material. Blank spaces, pauses, personal comments, asides, changes of mood, changes of attitude, changes of subject—all of the rhythms or ordinary conversation—are rarely allowed into television talk. To do otherwise would defy the medium’s demand for frequent catharsis, repeated high-light and achieved goals. Therefore talk show dialogues take on the same rhythms and follow the same values as dramatic programs or situations comedies or quiz shows of news. The dialogue moves from loaded line to loaded line, headline to headline, important pronouncement to important pronouncement, punch line to punch line, like Bob Hope’s humor. Verbal troughs are often written into dialogue shows. Many acting schools teach these. Talk shows hosts and guests indulge briefly in “patter” which is pseudoaimless. However, the process never advances very far. The goal remains a laugh or a point or a contention or an outrage or a shock. The conversation is never allowed to settle down to the rhythms of real life, because if it did, there would be no point in having the television on at all. One could have aimless conversation with someone at the bus stop. And so, as with the technically created artificial unusualness, content itself is usually chosen for its hyperactive effect. The survival of this dull, indistinct, inherently boring technological failure called television depend on this effect. Those who reject the Bible’s theory and who believe, let us say, in theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion. Their theory fails to give any guidance about moral information and, by definition, gives little weight to information that falls outside the constraints of science. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention, and authority, the result of which is that they make no moral decisions, only practical ones. This is still another way of defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a culture whose available theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable information in the moral domain. I trust the reader does not conclude that I am making an argument for fundamentalism of any kind. One can hardly approve, for example, of a Muslim fundamentalism that decrees a death sentence to someone who writes what are construed as blasphemous words, or a Christian fundamentalism that one did the same or could lead to the same. I must hasten to acknowledge, in this context, that it is entirely possible to live as a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jewish people with a modified and temperate view of religious theory. Here, I am merely making the point that religious tradition serves as a mechanism for the regulation and valuation of information. When religion loses much or all of its binding power—if it is reduced to mere rhetorical ash—then confusion inevitably flows about what to attend to and how to assign it. Indeed, another great World narrative, Marxism, is in the process of decomposing. No doubt there are fundamentalist Marxists who will not let go of Marx’s theory, and will continue to be guided by its prescription and constraints. The theory, after all, is sufficiently powerful to have engaged the imagination and devotion of more than a billion people. Like the Bible, the theory includes a transcendent idea, as do all great World narratives. With apologies to a century and a half of philosophical and sociological disputation, the idea is as follows: All forms of institutional misery and oppression are a result of class conflict, since the consciousness of all people is formed by their material situation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

God has no interest in this, because there is no God. However, there is a plane, which is both knowable and beneficent. The plan unfolds in the movement of history itself, which shows unmistakably that the working class, in the end, must triumph. When it does, with or without the help of revolutionary movements, class itself will have disappeared. All will share equally in the bounties of nature and creative production, and no one will exploit the labours of another. It is generally believed that this theory has fallen into disrepute among believers because information made available by television, films, telephone, fax machines, and other technologies has revealed that the working classes of capitalist nations are sharing quite nicely in the bounties of nature while at the same time enjoying a considerable measure of personal freedom. Their situation is so vastly superior to those of nations enacting Marxists theory that millions of people have concluded, seemingly all at once, that history may have no opinion whatever toward the fate of the working class or, if it has, that it is moving toward a final chapter quite different in its point from what Marx prophesied. All of this is said provisionally. History takes a long time, and there may yet be developments that will provide Marx’s vision with fresh sources of verisimilitude. Meanwhile, the following points need to be made: Believers in the Marxist story were given quite clear guidelines on how they were to weight information and therefore to understand events. To the extent that they now reject theory, they are threatened with conceptual confusions, which means they no longer know who to believe or what to believe. In the West, and especially in the United States of America, there is much rejoicing over this situation, and assurances are given that Marxism can be replaced by what is called “liberal democracy.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

However, this must be stated more as a question than an answer, for it is no longer entirely clear what sort of story liberal democracy tells. A clear and scholarly celebration of liberal democracy’s triumph rests on the fact that there will be no more ideological conflicts, all the competitors to modern liberalism having been defeated. However, many would like to challenge this idea. Several people believe that liberalism has become communism and will lead us back into slavery. However, in the early nineteenth century, when the principles of liberty and equality, as expressed in the American and French revolutions, emerged triumphant, with the contemporary decline of fascism and communism, some believe this is the reason that no threat exists. As one can see, these individuals paid insufficient attention to the changes in the meaning of liberal democracy over two and a half centuries. Its meaning in a technocracy is quite different from its meaning in Technopoly; indeed, in Technopoly it comes much closer to what Walter Benjamin called “commodity capitalism.” In the cause of the United States of America, the great eighteenth-century revolution was not indifferent to commodity capitalism but was nonetheless infused with the profound moral content. The United States of America was not merely an experiment in a new form of governance; it was the fulfillment of God’s plan. True, Adams, Jefferson, and Paine rejected the supernatural elements in the Bible, but they never doubted that their experiment had the imprimatur of Providence. People were to be free but for a purpose. Their God-given rights implied obligations and responsibilities, not only to God but to other nations, to which the new republic would be a guide and a showcase of what is possible when reason and spirituality commingle. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Reason’s exposedness in the rational regime is exacerbated by the absence of class in the old sense, based on principles or convictions of right. There is a general agreement about the most fundamental political principles, and therefore doubts about them have no status. In aristocracies there was also the part of the people, but in democracy there is no aristocratic party. This means that there is no protection for the opponents of the governing principles as well as no respectability for them. There were in the past also parties representing ecclesiastical interests against those of monarchs or aristocrats. These too provided a place for dissenting opinions to flourish. In the heat of our political squabbles we tend to lose sight of the fact that our differences of principle are very small, compared to those over which men used to fight. The only quarrel in our history that really involved fundamental differences about fundamental principles was over slavery. However, even the proponents of slavery hardly dared asset that some human beings are made by nature to serve other humans beings, as did Aristotle; they had to deny the humanity of the Africans. Besides, that question was really already settled with the Declaration of Independence. Black slavery was an aberration that had to be extinguished, not a permanent feature of our national life. Not only slavery, but aristocracy, monarch, and theocracy were laid to rest by the Declaration and the Constitution. This was very good for our domestic tranquility, but not very encouraging for theoretical doubts about triumphant equality. Not only were the old questions of political theorizing held to have been definitively answered, but the resources that couriered diversity concerning them were removed. Democratic conscience and the simple need to survive combine to suppress doubt. The kinds of questions put to the United States of America—the answers allow one to affirm the justice of equality more reasonably and more positively than many can do. This allows one to come out of an experience that we cannot have: a direct experience of an alternative regime and temper of soul—aristocracy. If we cannot in any way have access to something like that experience, our understanding of the range of human possibilities is impoverished, and our capacity to assess our strengths and weaknesses is diminished. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Move over, shiplap; there are new wood panel designs on the scene! 😉

Our home at #PlumasRanch uses some gorgeous vertical lines to enhance the design of this dining room; what do you think?

Ready to see the rest? Check out all the options for this community via the link in our bio. ☝️☝️☝️ https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-plumas-ranch/

#CresleighHomes